Without the linguistic expertise of the following individuals, much of the multilingual graffiti would still be titled “Greek graffiti”, “Chinese graffiti”, etc. The Arabic graffiti was translated by alphaprivee on Flickr; the Chinese was translated by Matthew Felix Sun and Ping Lieser, the Devanagari was translated by wally.mars on Flickr, the Greek was translated by Athanassios Vérgados, the Japanese was translated by Toshi Katayama and Lane Ware, Christian Hilchey provided Latin consultation, Bihui Li made sense out of the leetspeak, and Andy Dombrowski translated the Turkish. Lauren Osborne has translated the various pieces of Arabic graffiti, and David Yung Ho Kim has translated the various pieces of Korean graffiti.

Photographing the graffiti and putting together the book took over two years to complete, and there’s been times when my motivation has faltered. In April 2009, Molly Ammons in Monterey, California wrote the first blog post about the Regenstein graffiti. That post inspired me to get back to taking pictures in the stacks after four months of neglect. In July 2009, Carolyn Kellogg wrote a post on the L.A. Times ‘Jacket Copy’ blog that generated a lot of interest, and, with the encouragement of Sara Ware, convinced me to put together this book. The book project had begun to languish in a state of semi-completion when, in October 2009, Marcus Gilmer wrote about the graffiti on the Chicagoist. Without these gentle reminders that this was a project worth continuing, it would have remained nothing more than an unorganized, un-updated set of over 700 photos on Flickr.